White House Down

For nearly two thousand years, our Temple has been destroyed -- or “down” – yet we have managed to survive.

White House Down, the new blockbuster by Roland Emmerich, is part of the ever-growing new genre of movies where terrorists take over the White House.

Okay, technically, this is not a new genre. It’s basically Die Hard. The bad guys take over the White House, and they plan to – well, it’s hard to say what, exactly. In typical Die Hard fashion, the main bad guy, Agent Walker, has a villainous scheme that’s actually a cover for an even more villainous scheme. Also, he’s one day away from retirement.

Yippee kie yay, Mr. Walker.

Not only that, but he’s gone through the “Secret Service Book of People from All Walks of Life Who Might Want to Kill the President” to recruit his men, and every single one of them has a different reason to be there. There are the militant racists, guys who want the hostage negotiation money, the evil computer genius, the guy who just wants to be president, the soldier who wants revenge on the president for ordering a strike in the Middle East that got his friend killed, and a guy who is infuriated by the president’s bold new magical Middle East peace plan. We never actually find out what that peace plan is, which is a shame, because all the other countries seem to accept it. So it must be a doozy. My guess is that as soon as the movie is over, everyone backs out of it and goes back to killing each other.

Together to bad guys have a plan, which is mostly in the main villain’s head, and that plan is entirely foolproof, unless one of the hostages from the White House tour group escapes and goes around killing all the bad guys one at a time in a sleeveless undershirt with bloodstains, while the authorities wait patiently outside, occasionally checking in by phone.

The hero, John McLane – Oops, I mean John Cale, who is not at all the product of someone going over a Die Hard script and hitting “find and replace” – ends up saving the day in between taking cover in elevator shafts and bathrooms and limos in the basement garage and, of course, behind bulletproof couches.

Yippee kie yay, Mr. Walker.

Of course, this movie is updated for modern times. John has to fight terrorists AND be a single father. It’s a grind. His estranged daughter is actually one of the hostages – though she helps him out with her iPhone – and in the end, their relationship is okay. It turns out that if you save the free world, your child will look up to you again. That’s good advice for us all.

But it gets pretty rough there for a while. The White House is down. All of it is down at some point – the lights are down, the phone lines are down, the fence is down, the internet is down, the pool is down, there’s a Ming vase…

But as one of the characters points out, “Our country is stronger than one house.”

And it is. When everyone thinks the president is dead (despite it being clearly established at the beginning of the movie that they have heat scanners that can see people through walls), the vice president gets sworn in, and when the vice president dies, the speaker of the house get sworn in. Altogether, over the course of the movie, the presidency changes hands like 5 times.

But that’s our system. All these people are in different locations, and that means you can’t take them all down at once. In fact, the president and vice president never fly on the same plane, and not just because Obama doesn’t want to have to make awkward conversation with Joe Biden all the way to the Middle East.

And if one ever gets taken down, the other just takes his place. Our whole government is specifically structured so that if one person dies, the whole country doesn’t fall apart. We have 3 branches of government whose job it is to remorselessly shoot each other’s ideas down, so that every president gets into office promising to make changes but then realizes that it’s actually harder to make decisions once you’re married.

But the upside is that if it were that easy to change anything, this country would have collapsed a long time ago.

The point, though, is that it’s not the end of the free world if the president gets killed. Everyone just takes a step to the right and the next guy becomes president. And then the next guy.

This is as opposed to the bad guys in a Die Hard movie, who all gather together under one roof so they can be taken down easily by a guy who didn’t have time to finish getting dressed before the bad guys showed up.

And despite the good guy killing bad guys as he stumbles across them, the main villain is always taken out last. Never second to last, never by accident all the way at the beginning. In fact, the bad guys are always taken down in reverse order, from least important to most important. 3rd in command gets taken out 3rd to last, and so on.

But there’s the difference. The main villain has to be taken out last, for story purposes. Otherwise, the whole plan will fall apart, because after all, it’s all in his head. Especially in this instance, where every bad guy has a different goal. The main bad guys have to get taken down last because once they’re gone, the plot is gone. But good doesn’t work that way.

Jews don’t work that way.

We’re all over the place. But in a good way. Wherever you go, you can be surprised – “Hey, look! More Jews!”

(Yikes. That sounded less racist in my head.)

But it wasn’t always this way. Before the destruction of the Temple, we all basically lived in one place. But then when things started going south and God decided we would no longer be untouchable, he made sure we scattered all over the place, so that no matter what happened, there’d be some of us left to carry on. We can’t all fly on one plane anymore.

The way to stick around, at this point, is that we have to be united in mission. And not keep the entire plan in one head, but to keep passing it on to our kids, by spending time with them – taking trips, getting taken hostage on those trips, saving the day together, and so on.

Yes, our Temple was destroyed, but we’re stronger than just one house. We believe that each house is a temple, run by a man and a woman who sometimes fly separately.

I've been striving to get more into spirituality. But it seems that every time I make some progress, I find myself slipping right back to where I started. I'm getting discouraged and feel like a failure. Can you help?

The Aish Rabbi Replies:

Spiritual slumps are a natural part of spiritual growth. There is a cycle that people go through when at times they feel closer to God and at times more distant. In the words of the Kabbalists, it is "two steps forward and one step back." So although you feel you are slipping, know that this is a natural process. The main thing is to look at your overall progress (over months or years) and be able to see how far you've come!

This is actually God's ingenious way of motivating us further. The sages compare this to teaching a baby how to walk. When the parent is holding on, the baby shrieks with delight and is under the illusion that he knows how to walk. Yet suddenly, when the parent lets go, the child panics, wobbles and may even fall.

At such times when we feel spiritually "down," that is often because God is letting go, giving us the great gift of independence. In some ways, these are the times when we can actually grow the most. For if we can move ourselves just a little bit forward, we truly acquire a level of sanctity that is ours forever.

Here is a practical tool to help pull you out of the doldrums. The Sefer HaChinuch speaks about a great principle in spiritual growth: "The external awakens the internal." This means that although we may not experience immediate feelings of closeness to God, eventually, by continuing to conduct ourselves in such a manner, this physical behavior will have an impact on our spiritual selves and will help us succeed. (A similar idea is discussed by psychologists who say: "Smile and you will feel happy.")

That is the power of Torah commandments. Even if we may not feel like giving charity or praying at this particular moment, by having a "mitzvah" obligation to do so, we are in a framework to become inspired. At that point we can infuse that act of charity or prayer with all the meaning and lift it can provide. But if we'd wait until being inspired, we might be waiting a very long time.

May the Almighty bless you with the clarity to see your progress, and may you do so with joy.

In 1940, a boatload 1,600 Jewish immigrants fleeing Hitler's ovens was denied entry into the port of Haifa; the British deported them to the island of Mauritius. At the time, the British had acceded to Arab demands and restricted Jewish immigration into Palestine. The urgent plight of European Jewry generated an "illegal" immigration movement, but the British were vigilant in denying entry. Some ships, such as the Struma, sunk and their hundreds of passengers killed.

If you seize too much, you are left with nothing. If you take less, you may retain it (Rosh Hashanah 4b).

Sometimes our appetites are insatiable; more accurately, we act as though they were insatiable. The Midrash states that a person may never be satisfied. "If he has one hundred, he wants two hundred. If he gets two hundred, he wants four hundred" (Koheles Rabbah 1:34). How often have we seen people whose insatiable desire for material wealth resulted in their losing everything, much like the gambler whose constant urge to win results in total loss.

People's bodies are finite, and their actual needs are limited. The endless pursuit for more wealth than they can use is nothing more than an elusive belief that they can live forever (Psalms 49:10).

The one part of us which is indeed infinite is our neshamah (soul), which, being of Divine origin, can crave and achieve infinity and eternity, and such craving is characteristic of spiritual growth.

How strange that we tend to give the body much more than it can possibly handle, and the neshamah so much less than it needs!